E-Commerce Web Design

The modern website is so much more than a necessity now. Every business has a site, so it’s no longer as simple as merely having a website. You need a website that stands out from the pack, ranks higher than the competition and develops both leads and potential clients, all at the same time. While there are numerous website building services out there providing cookie-cutter designs with limited features, these digital storefronts typically perform poorly on search engines. For your business, it’s well worth the investment to work with Simplemachine in Bentonville, AR in order to produce a customized E-commerce web design aimed at improving conversion rates while attracting new customers at the same time.

Simplemachine stands by the benefits offered by WooCommerce over DIY ecommerce builders like Squarespace or Shopify. If you’re unfamiliar with either, or are just discovering WooCommerce, it’s important to know the difference and why taking advantage of the best eCommerce platform for your situation is beneficial.

What is WooCommerce?

Similar to Shopify, WooCommerce allows you to showcase an eCommerce digital storefront through your website. This way, customers can visit your store through your website, and not some external source that’s not actually hosted and protected on your website. The benefit of WooCommerce allows you to have complete control over your online store, without being dictated by what your service provider will limit your access to or control over. With WooCommerce, the sky is really the limit and your store can look, function and feature everything and anything you need for it to accomplish.

Want to know what else is great about WooCommerce? It’s a part of WordPress so not only will you receive a ton of support from its network of developers, WooCommerce also speaks directly with search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing, allowing you to access and implement everything that is necessary to build and optimize your products, images, pages, and website as a whole. Shoppers who visit the website can search for products and find direct links to your products within the site, making it a wonderful and easy user experience.

Major Benefits Over Shopify

There are a number of available platforms for listing and selling your merchandise online. Beyond your custom eCommerce website that a company like Simplemachine provides, Shopify® has long stood as one of the most popular options. But it does have its limitations. Shopify is a host eCommerce platform. This means Shopify controls and hosts everything you upload. While you do have flexibility within the platform, you are somewhat limited in the overall scope of changes you can make to the storefront.

WooCommerce is self-hosted. This allows you to freely change just about everything within the store, from visuals to the overall appearance of the site. Combine this with the management services of SimpleMachine and you have far greater control over everything going on with the eCommerce storefront.

One of the main reasons businesses turn to Shopify is because it is beginner-friendly. The hosted feature makes it easier to hit the ground running. When you use a service provider like Simplemachine, you don’t have this problem. Everything is set up for you, so you can bypass the learning curve issue.

Marketshare is an important stat to consider when looking for the best eCommerce platform. Despite the popularity of Shopify, it only has a seven percent market share for all internet storefronts. WooCommerce has 40% of the market. This increases your product exposure dramatically.

By taking advantage of a service provider such as Simplemachine, you’ll have your eCommerce site up and running, and the self-hosted features give greater control.

Standard Features Offered

Simplemachine uses the WordPress Content Management System (CMS). As a CMS, WordPress remains a popular developer tool, as around 25 percent of all sites currently build off of this management system. However, while a quarter of the sites online are built using WordPress, thanks to the flexibility of the software, it’s possible to completely customize your website.

There are numerous benefits when it comes to using WordPress. Since a large portion of the Internet community uses it, there’s an exceptional amount of information available, dictating what works, what doesn’t and how to produce an elegant site for your customers. Additionally, it’s possible to upgrade and implement new features in WordPress relatively easily. Other website platforms do not use these interchangeable building blocks, but instead require entirely new websites when it comes time to upgrade. With the Internet’s continual evolution, it remains vital to any business to have a site with easy customization, since upgrading right along with the Internet maintains a strong search engine presence and ranking.

Responsive Website & Mobile Optimized

In 2018, more people view the Internet through their mobile device than through traditional computer screens. Despite this, far too many sites fail to optimize for mobile devices. This is one area you can thrive in with the help of a responsive website that is mobile optimized.

Prior to the release of the smartphone, a website designer had very few variables to worry about. Screen size dimensions remain relatively the same, and only a few different Internet browsers existed. Beyond building a site visible on both a Mac and PC, a responsive website proved unnecessary.

Times have changed, though. Computer screens come in varying sizes, with a growing number of Internet browsers and an assortment of operating system versions. On top of this, with the variety of mobile device screen sizes, mobile operating systems, and available Internet browsers, there are almost limitless variables at play. When a website isn’t responsive, it requires the user to constantly zoom in, zoom out, scroll, swipe and adjust the display area. Spending this kind of time attempting to view the website often results in a user backing out and looking for a site that properly fits the dimensions of his or her screen. Every website visitor who abandons the page because of no responsive display capabilities represents a lost potential lead or customer. Simplemachine takes advantage of a responsive design that fits not only desktops but mobile devices as well.

Optimization for mobile devices stands as one of the most important site design traits to come about in recent years. Google gives preferential treatment to sites with a mobile-friendly design during a mobile search, and as more mobile searches are performed than traditional searches, ranking well on mobile phones and tablets is a must. All of this comes standard with the E-commerce Web design services provided by Simplemachine.

Standard Site Features

In addition to using the WordPress CMS and responsive website design (featuring HTML layouts and stylesheets), there are a number of additional standard site features provided in the E-commerce Web design services. Some of these features include:

WordPress CMS

WooCommerce

Social Media Integration

Contact Form

Search Engine Optimization Package

CMS Training

Promo Slider

Contact Form

The contact form is one of the many ways your website can develop new leads and build its ever important email list. From a pop-up that appears when a visitor attempts to leave the page to a display window offering shopper benefits by providing their email address, there are varying ways a contact form can be implemented into the E-commerce web design of your site. It just depends on what you’re looking for and how you want visitors to interact with it.

Search Engine Optimization Package

More now than ever before, quality content makes or breaks your site. Search engines such as Google have developed finely tuned algorithms to identify excellent material over blog posts and text designed simply to “trick search engines.” However, this doesn’t mean search engine optimization is dead – far from it. It just takes more gentle, finely tuned specifics, along with quality content, to boost search engine rankings. Many sites are still overusing keywords. This keyword jamming may actually end up dropping your site’s score. It needs to flow naturally, yet still include specific words.

Beyond keyword optimization, your search engine optimization package will include proper image optimization. Not formatting your images for the Web is a major problem. For one, many novice website designers use native images. These visuals may range from several megabytes in size to several hundred, which slows down the load time. A slower website will see its search engine ranking drop while visitors become less likely to remain on a slow loading website. On top of this, proper image titles, image alt text and descriptions help search engines identify your visuals, which is another way to boost SEO. E-commerce Web design requires very specific SEO, done with a skilled eye and carried out by experienced professionals. Simplemachine will help implement the necessary SEO improvements that can boost search engine rankings.

Social Media Integration

Social media allows for easy communication with customers and potential clients. It’s more than just another advertising tool, which far too many businesses see it as. While marketing does play a major part in using social media, the businesses with the largest social followers and influence use it to interact with the general public and to provide helpful information not always available on the website. Providing links between social media accounts and your website is a must. This brings customers to your website from social media pages like Twitter, Pinterest, and LinkedIn. All digital avenues need to lead to your website, and with proper social media integration, that will be true.

CMS Training

While Simplemachine is here to assist you with your E-commerce Web design, you may want to know how to use the content management system, how to post new blogs and how to add additional features along the way. You shouldn’t be left in the dark when it comes to this, which is why Simplemachine provides you with optional CMS training. This training includes screenshots, in-person meetings, instructional videos and more.

Promo Slider

Showing off the latest sales and newest products is important for your site. One of the best ways to grab the attention of a site visitor is with the aid of a promo slider. These rotating promotional banners will showcase whatever you want. So whether you have a brand new product, a special sale or another bit of information you want to educate potential consumers about, the promo slider is one method you need to take advantage of.

Additional Services

Simplemachine offers many more E-commerce Web design services for you to take advantage of. By taking advantage of Google Adwords to spread the word of your business all the way to content marketing, Simplemachine wants to ensure your website performs at peak efficiency. Plus, with the help of Google Analytics (plus third-party analytical platforms if you’re interested in even more data to go off of), you’ll know how your site is performing, what’s performing well and what areas can see improvements.

Contact Simplemachine Today!

Discover the Benefits of Simplemachine

When growing your internet footprint, one of the best ways to do so is with the aid of utilizing eCommerce solutions. These platforms can expose you to additional customers while ultimately boosting sales.

At Simplemachine, WooCommerce is the platform of choice. If you’re ready to begin building your Ecommerce website, have further questions about whether it’s right for your business, or would simply like to know more about Simplemachine, now is the time to reach out and give the team a call.